Slide Mountain is the highest peak in the Catskill Mountains of the U.S. state of New York. It is located in the town of Shandaken in Ulster County. While the contour line on topographic maps is generally accepted as its height, the exact elevation of the summit has never been officially determined by the U.S. National Geodetic Survey or its predecessors, and many informal surveys suggest the mountain may actually top above sea level. Geographically, it is the highest natural point within the New York Metropolitan Area.

While it was not identified as the range's highest peak until the late 19th century, it has played a prominent role in Catskill history. Renowned naturalist John Burroughs wrote memorably of his climbs up Slide, and it helped get the Catskills added to New York's Forest Preserve. Bicknell's thrush was first identified on its summit.

Geography

Like most other Catskill peaks, Slide's summit is gentle and rounded, taking the form of a narrow ridge that rises to a wider bump on its eastern end. From there the mountain slopes down steeply to the col with neighboring Cornell Mountain.

At the western end, a broad slope, part of the Catskill Divide, leads down to the gap between Slide and Hemlock Mountain to the west and Winnisook Lake, the source of Esopus Creek, to the mountain's northwest.

Two more pronounced ridges lead off the mountain, one to the southwest and the col with Wildcat Mountain, the other to the north and Giant Ledge.

Both upper branches of the Neversink River begin on the mountain's slopes.

In addition to the Catskills, Slide is also the highest point of:

Ulster County. the New York metropolitan area, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau the Delaware River watershed. all of the state of New York outside the Adirondack High Peaks region. a radius of New York City. (Slide is located roughly north/northwest of Manhattan; the southwest flank of Vermont's Killington Peak, about north northeast of the Bronx, is the next closest point of equal elevation.)

It is also the southernmost peak in the Northeast exceeding . The Appalachians do not rise to that level again until West Virginia.

Climate These data are taken from the weather station at Winnisook Lake on the mountain's northwest slope.

There is no weather station at the summit, but this climate table contains interpolated data for an area around the summit.

History

Identification as highest Catskill peak For a mountain with so many superlatives, Slide actually took a long time to be discovered for what it was.

The mountain received its name locally from a landslide in 1819 on its north face near the summit. The scar can still be seen today, and was partially gouged out again by another slide in 1982.

Slide would not be established as the highest peak in the range until 1886, long after much of the interior Northeast and their mountain ranges had been surveyed and settled. Due to land disputes and schemes that dated back to the colonial period, no complete, impartial survey of the entire Catskill region had been carried out until then.

Seven years earlier, Princeton geology professor Arnold Henry Guyot had been staying at the Catskill Mountain House when he became interested in the surrounding mountains, and management's claim that nearby Kaaterskill High Peak () was the highest in all the Catskills despite growing doubt. His survey, carried out on his own time and at his own expense, established that Slide, located some distance to the southwest, was far and away the highest peak in the range. His findings were vehemently disputed by the hotelkeepers around North-South Lake until others confirmed his results.

There was a movement, once its status had been confirmed, to give Slide a name believed to be more fitting for a highest peak. "Mount Lincoln," after the late U.S. president, was considered for a while. But it ended when Guyot announced that he preferred Slide, as he had followed local custom wherever possible in naming the peaks for his survey.

Legends have grown up over the years in the Catskills over this belated discovery of the range's highest peak. Some tell of a new owner of Hunter Mountain, the range's other 4,000-footer and second-highest peak, swinging a level around to ensure he had bought the highest peak until being stopped by Slide. Another story has John Burroughs, who later became rich and famous writing about his hikes up Slide and other nearby mountains, proving the case atop the mountain by having his friends aim a rifle with a ball in the barrel at all other contending peaks and observing that the ball fell out every time.

Regardless, tourism soon shifted to the new highest peak, and a local woodsman, Jim Dutcher, who knew the mountain well from his days peeling hemlock bark for tanning, built a hotel and did a regular business escorting visitors to the summit up a trail he built in 1880. While it runs over privately owned land and has been abandoned since 1941 save for the final section leading across the summit ridge from the west, it still exists and can be followed.

Forest Preserve Around the same time, Slide would prove instrumental in creating New York's Forest Preserve as it exists today.

Some of the other private lands near the mountain had been utterly deprived of any value by tanners who had decided to boost their profits by neglecting to pay their property taxes and simply leaving the area. At that time, when the county took possession through foreclosure, it was among those required by the state to guarantee payment of state property taxes.

Many county voters and landowners felt shafted, leading Ulster to refuse to pay despite a court order. Their representatives in Albany worked out a compromise by which the lands in question were given to the state as part of the newly established Forest Preserve, originally meant to include just the Adirondacks, to satisfy the county's unpaid debts to the state. That was the beginning of what ultimately became the Catskill Park.

On June 11, 1886, a delegation from the state's forest commission climbed Slide to give some sort of official recognition to the peak and the Catskill Forest Preserve. While they used Dutcher's trail, the man himself did not take part ... in fact, he did no maintenance on the trail beforehand, since he was a Republican and the commissioners had been appointed by Democratic governor David Hill. Nevertheless, the party got to the summit, where Townsend Cox, head of the commission, declared the view as fine as anything to be found in the Adirondacks.

The next year the state decided to use along the West Branch of the Neversink at the west slope of the mountain (south of the current trailhead) to reintroduce white-tailed deer, which had been seriously thinned in the area over the preceding century. A wooden fence was built around the whole area to protect them from poaching, and eventually 95 deer were released back into the wild, successfully re-establishing the species.

Ironically, today there are actually very few deer in that area, because the undisturbed forest no longer offers as much of the second- and third-growth species deer prefer to feed on, and predators such as black bears have become more numerous as well.

The new legislation helped Slide score a significant first in 1892, when the state appropriated $250 to build a trail, paralleling Dutcher's, up the west side of the mountain — the first trail built at public expense in the Forest Preserve. A survey was also authorized to determine whether it was on public land, and even though it was not the trail was built anyway.

While heavily eroded and rocky, it is still in use today as part of the Burroughs Range Trail and remains the most frequently used ascent.

Two years later the Forest Preserve legislation was written into a new version of New York's constitution as Article 14.

John Burroughs

Slide's fame was spread far and wide by Burroughs. He had often been able to see the peak's summit ridge from Old Clump Mountain near his boyhood home in Delaware County, likening it to seeing a horse grazing from behind.

He tried to climb the mountain several times with friends, and his account of his successful ascent from nearby Woodland Valley, "The Heart of the Southern Catskills," is one of his best works. He wrote of the view from the summit:

We saw the world as the hawk or the balloonist sees it when he is three thousand feet in the air. How soft and flowing all the outlines of the hills and mountains beneath us looked! The forests dropped down and undulated away over them, covering them like a carpet ... All was mountain and forest on every hand. Civilization seemed to have done little more than to have scratched this rough, shaggy surface of the earth here and there. In any such view, the wild, the aboriginal, the geographical greatly predominate. The works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface. You discover with a feeling of surprise that the great thing is the earth itself, which stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken. "Here the works of man dwindle," was put on a plaque near the summit by the Winnisook Club shortly after his death in 1921 and placed on a ledge near the summit that offers the best view from the mountain. It has since been known as Burroughs Ledge.

Eugene Bicknell

Another early visitor to the mountain was an amateur ornithologist from Brooklyn named Eugene Bicknell. On one of those days, he caught a small brown thrush near the summit which he was unable to identify as belonging to any known species of that time.

The bird was named Slide Mountain thrush at first, then Bicknell's thrush when it was found living high up in the boreal forests of other Northeastern mountains. But it was not studied, as prevailing scientific opinion of the time considered it a subspecies of the gray-cheeked thrush. Only in the late 20th century did newer research methods such as DNA comparisons prove that it was, indeed, a separate species, setting off a scramble to save habitat and learn as much as possible about it.

Early 20th century The trail built in 1892 had been meant to facilitate travel to the lookout towers that existed in some form or another on the mountain's summit. Recreational visitors found views from the summit severely limited without a stand to get above the trees; the state was interested in fire control.

Despite the peak's importance in establishing the Forest Preserve in the Catskills, much of the land remained in private hands. While purchases in 1900 did much to change that, it would take until 1928 before the state actually acquired the summit property and much of the land it had already built a trail on.

During World War II, a small military training plane crashed on the mountain's east slope at about . While most of the debris is gone, the site can still be reached via a short side path from the Burroughs Range Trail.

Fire lookout tower The first fire lookout structure built on the mountain was a wooden tower. The site was operational in 1912, at which time the site was deemed unsuitable for fire lookout operations and later officially closed in 1916. In 1934, a steel tower was built on the mountain, but was never used for fire lookout purposes. The tower later deteriorated and was removed in 1968.

Wilderness area In the mid-1960s, the formal organization of the Catskill Mountain 3500 Club, the range's first peak bagging organization, gave more hikers a reason to climb the mountain as they were required to do so at least twice, once in wintertime and once during the rest of the year, for membership.

Around the same time, the Long Path was also routed over the mountain when it was finally established as a marked trail rather than a collection of points of interest. The summit is still the highest point on the entire trail.